A Cancer Diagnosis at 21 Taught Me to Run—and I Haven't Stopped

One freezing day in February 2016, I took the shuttle from the campus at Johns Hopkins, where I was a senior, to a hospital in Baltimore for a scan of my abdomen. My doctor wanted to get a closer look at what appeared to be a harmless group of necrotic lymph nodes lingering near my liver, after she had stumbled upon what looked like "a bunch of grapes" during a routine test. Heading to the hospital that day, I was in a hurry, worried about making it back for a 1:30 class and not pleased about the fasting guidelines. While I waited for my name to be called, I picked up a travel magazine and landed on an article entitled “Running for My Life.” It was about a woman who had lost the love of her life and father of her children to a massive stroke as he trained for a marathon. He was fit, just over 40, and vivacious. Needless to say, his wife’s life was upended by his death, and she found herself chin-deep in depression. One day she decided to take off running. She was not a regular runner and was exhausted following that first jaunt around her block. But the next day she did it again. Before she knew it, she was running every day, sometimes for a few minutes, other times for an hour. She’d talk to her husband on the runs, and let the pain seep out of her pores with the sweat.

The next week, in a sparse doctor's office above a strip mall, I was diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer. Those lymph nodes were not harmless at all; they made up a tumor that was pushed up against my hepatic artery and growing rather quickly. During the elevator ride down, my dad was quiet for what seemed like the first time ever, and my mom was crying into the sleeve of her jacket. When the doors opened on the ground floor, I found myself staring into a wedding dress boutique, and my breath caught. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and steered me to the parking lot but not before a thought entered my mind: Good luck surviving long enough for that.

Those first few days I could think only in numbers and timelines: I am 21 years old. Today is February 12. My college graduation is May 18. My brother’s wedding is June 18. My first real-world job starts July 5. There's a 20 to 30 percent chance the chemo will work. “Many decline quickly within five months,” from the Internet. Two spots (one outside the liver, one inside). How many eggs do I have left? Should we freeze them? “You’d be crazy to delay chemo for that.”

Moments between thinking about the numbers and timelines were used to make lists of things I was going to lose: hair, weight, my new boyfriend, red blood cells, hope for a long career, a pretty wedding in my late twenties, a sweet husband, sweeter kids, a stint abroad. These lists were all etched in my head and got lengthier with each appointment: a chance at graduate school, my menstrual cycle, my muscle tone. Chemo started on a Friday, the day campus was clearing out for spring break. I brought my schoolbooks and tried to do homework but had a bad reaction to one of the medications, making my face twitch and my jaw freeze up, garbling my speech and blurring my vision. Once that settled down, I closed my books and pretended to sleep so that I wouldn’t have to slur out responses to different varieties of the same question: "How are you feeling now?"

Around school I was smiling, fist-bumping people, and saying things like: “It could be worse!” “It’ll just be another thing on my schedule!" "Side item on the menu of life!” I'd laugh when they told me they’d shave off their hair if I lost mine. While my friends were finding apartments in new cities and making summer plans, I spent my time thinking about how I could fully express my love for the people in my life before I stopped living. Don’t get me wrong; I was happy for them and wanted to hear it all, but I dreaded the beat of silence that came when someone asked me a question about my future. “I’m not sure,” I’d say as nonchalantly as possible. “I’ll let you know when I finish chemo.” Which always resulted in another beat or two of silence before I asked something specific enough to distract them from my postgrad plans. “When you move to San Francisco, will your dog come?”

Somewhere along the way I remembered that bus ride to the hospital and reading “Running for My Life." Tired of being watched like a hawk in the confines of the dorm room that my mom and I now shared, and even more tired of reminding everyone to try and carry on as usual, I decided to try the writer’s strategy. Unlike the author, I was a runner before, but now my runs were different. I was running to hear my heartbeat in my ears and notice things I hadn’t before, like the red-breasted birds around the reservoir. Not to train for a half-marathon and not to look like a cancer-fighting champion, but to grieve and vent and cry. These runs were my way to break down, stomp my feet, pump my fists, let tears mix with sweat and drip down my chin. Running gave me a chance to do these humiliating yet liberating things, things that would normally be met with stitched brows or pep talks.

As I huffed my way through mile after mile, I found that the city around me didn’t take pity on me, and I loved it. The longer I ran, the less I thought about the things that cancer would take from me, and more about what I could do in this life to make the world a bit kinder. As my feet hit the pavement rhythmically, my mind bit off and chewed on the innumerable injustices that were playing out in Baltimore and the nation at large. With every step I took, I found less reasons to ask “Why me?” and more reasons to live and fight. Not for a wedding with white hanging lights and "Canon in D," but for the struggles of my city, one that had seen far more pain and cruelty than I would ever know: for Freddie Gray and countless others subject to police brutality; for the West Baltimore friends I’d made as a tutor, who came home to no father and no dinner; for children I passed while on the Johns Hopkins shuttle, being offered discounted Percocet on their walks to school; for all of the inequities that plague our society and world that I lived knowing about but not fully acknowledging or internalizing. Sure, I was young with cancer, but there were greater injustices festering outside of my own body. On those runs I felt acutely aware of my own mortality and simultaneously abuzz with a desire to live a life beyond my circumstances, regardless of the amount of time I had left.

My runs became shorter about a month into treatment as chemotherapy took to killing both bad and good cells, but they held more and more meaning as I allowed the city to challenge me to live more fully and intentionally. In keeping my mind and body aware of what I wanted to change, I felt more vigor for life than I ever imagined I would upon leaving that doctor’s office with what I thought was little more than a softly administered death sentence.

I live and work in Washington, D.C., now, where the sidewalks are a little less craggy. After six months of chemotherapy, a month of radiation, and an eight-hour surgery that left a silvery scar down my belly, I am cancer-free. Of course, the threat of recurrence looms every now and again, but with scans every few months, I rarely have time to get nervous before I’m back in that big white MRI tube.

In reality some of the losses that I predicted did materialize. But I managed to graduate and walk down the aisle at my brother’s wedding. No one knows why my case did not follow the statistics; my oncologist simply called it a miracle—a miracle I believe consisted of unwavering support of friends and family, fervent prayers, and a pair of light blue Nike running shoes.

There are still difficulties in my life that push me to lace up and go on runs to help me forget heartbreaks and struggles and reroute my thoughts to the greater injustices outside of my body and my situation. In D.C. my job is centered on immigration and refugee advocacy. Day in and day out, I am faced with heartbreaking stories of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations: children separated from parents, innocent men and women fleeing life-threatening situations, deemed dangerous in their desperation. It’s probably no surprise that after a long day I take my stresses to the streets. This year I got my second shot at this beautiful mess of a life, and I’m determined to live it well and give others their fair shot as well.